LEARNING SPACE DESIGN & ENGINEERING IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT OF STUDENTS IN A PBL CONTEXT

Previous studies on the impacts of learning environments and contexts on students’ professional identity formation showed how factors like room layout could affect learners emotionally, influencing their motivation, interactions and performance. They also showed how, for example, in problem-based learning situations, and group-work specifically, female students’ engineering identity formation differed from their male counterparts.
An ongoing study on an engineering school’s project-oriented, problem-based (PoPBL) learning curriculum aims at analysing the interactions between different learning environment and students’ personal characteristics. The focus is on how these interactions affect students’ engineering identity development. The project aims at addressing diversity in a PBL engineering curriculum, and understanding how different student profiles may respond to various learning spaces, with the purpose of producing recommendations on what types of learning spaces may foster all students’ self-efficacy in engineering postures and missions.
Data was collected from questionnaires to a cohort (n=59) of 4th year engineering students in the PoPBL programme.
Students’ engineering identity formation was measured using their perceived and recognized acquisition of interpersonal, organisational and creativity skills, and their overall identification to engineering postures, as indicators.
Correlation tests were used to measure the mutual influences of three independent environmental variables and four independent personal. The data collected confirmed that specific environmental layouts might interfere with personal characteristics to affect students’ engineering identity formation and self-efficacy.